Solar Power—Taking It to the Street

The Idea That Wouldn’t Go Away

The cou­ple met when they were tod­dlers in Buena Park, California; Julie’s fam­ily lived right behind Scott’s, and they shared a back­yard. Julie’s mom used to babysit Scott.

“We went to Sunday school and preschool together and were in the same first-grade class,” Scott Brusaw related to Organic Connections. “One of my favorite toys at that time was my lit­tle HO scale slot car track—the lit­tle elec­tric cars on their elec­tric rail. My six-year-old mind at the time thought, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be great if roads were elec­tric so kids could drive!’ It stuck with me. When we were going to Sunday school and preschool together I would draw pic­tures. I’ve still got some old pic­tures in which I was try­ing to visu­al­ize an elec­tric road.”

The years passed. Scott’s fam­ily moved to Ohio, but Scott and Julie remained in touch through let­ters. Scott attained a master’s degree in engi­neer­ing. The two reunited and got mar­ried and even­tu­ally set­tled in north­ern Idaho. Climate change became an issue, and Scott and Julie, in their off time, would study up on what might be done about it.

Then one day Julie recalled Scott’s child­hood vision—with an added twist. “We were sit­ting out in our gar­den one day,” Scott recalled. “Julie turned to me and said, ‘Can’t you make those elec­tric roads you’ve always dreamed of out of solar pan­els?’ At first I said, ‘No. Solar pan­els are very frag­ile and you can’t even step on them, let alone drive on them.’ So we started bat­ting this idea back and forth and think­ing of things like a black box on an air­plane. That’s a lit­tle case that houses sen­si­tive elec­tron­ics through the worst of air­plane crashes and pro­tects them. If we could make a big­ger ver­sion of that—a struc­turally engi­neered com­part­ment for solar cells that would with­stand the beat­ing of an 18-wheeler—then, yeah, we could make a solar panel that you could actu­ally drive on.

Reality Check

Scott and Julie started giv­ing the idea seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion. Scott con­tacted the two top mate­ri­als research labs in the country—at the time Penn State University and the University of Dayton—and paid them per­sonal visits.

He learned a great deal about the prop­er­ties of glass. “Like every­body else, I thought about glass in terms of a win­dow, and what would hap­pen if you laid it down and poured water on it,” Scott said. “If this were a road, the first time it rained every­body would slide off it. That’s just our con­cep­tion of glass. But I learned that glass has many dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties. For exam­ple, most of us have heard of bul­let­proof glass. I saw glass that would bend like a sheet of paper, and many other wild things.”

On the visit to the University of Dayton, Scott found them work­ing on what was called bomb-resistant glass; for vehi­cles in war sce­nar­ios, a bomb could go off at point-blank range and the glass wouldn’t blow inward cre­at­ing shrap­nel for the vehicle’s occu­pants. One researcher on that project looked over Scott’s specs. “He said we could take that for­mula, tweak it a lit­tle bit, lay it down on the road and it would take any­thing an 18-wheeler could do to it,” Scott recalled. “That was exactly what I wanted to hear.”

The project began pro­gress­ing from there. “I knew then that we could take this glass sur­face and put solar cells under­neath it,” said Scott. “They wouldn’t be touched by the traf­fic and they would just col­lect power from the roads that are bak­ing in the sun anyway.

“Then it started get­ting excit­ing, because you had this cas­ing and you could put any­thing you wanted in there. We’re gen­er­at­ing power, so we could put in elec­tric cir­cuitry. My wife and I are in our fifties now, and we live on a long, wind­ing moun­tain­ous road. It’s hard for me to see at night, and when it rains, for­get it; I can barely see where the edge of the road is. They don’t come through and paint these lines but every few years. So we thought, what if we put LEDs in there so that we could illu­mi­nate the road lines from under­neath, like dri­ving on a video game? It would be real easy to dis­tin­guish where the road is, where the lines are, and where you’re sup­posed to be.

“Because the dis­play on the road can change, you could also have sen­sors that would detect when some­thing was on the road. Where we live there are a lot of ani­mal col­li­sions: deer, moose—and peo­ple hit a bear every once in a while. So let’s say I’m dri­ving home one night and a deer walks around the next curve. A par­tic­u­lar panel could begin flash­ing, and it could talk to all the other pan­els up ahead, and it would know where the cars are because it can sense them too. It knows there’s a car approach­ing that curve. It can tell the pan­els up ahead to flash ‘slow down’ in front of that dri­ver; then he or she will know that there’s some­thing around that next curve and be ready for it.”

The road would have many other prop­er­ties as well, such as the abil­ity to heat up in win­ter months and melt snow and ice, elim­i­nat­ing the need for snow removal equip­ment and mak­ing roads far safer for drivers.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Into the Real World

Not hav­ing any clue on mar­ket­ing, yet think­ing they might have one of the great­est ideas to come along in mod­ern times, Scott and Julie did the first thing they thought of: they put up a web­site. The web­site got cov­er­age from another site, Treehugger.com, and that arti­cle was seen by con­sult­ing firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Scott got invited to the company’s head­quar­ters in Virginia to do a one-hour pre­sen­ta­tion. In the audi­ence was a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Federal Highway Administration, who invited Scott to deliver the same pre­sen­ta­tion to them.

“At that point, we didn’t even know if what we were propos­ing was pos­si­ble yet,” Scott remem­bered. “I thought we should go ahead and do that pre­sen­ta­tion, because if any­body was going to shoot us down it would be the Department of Transportation [the Federal Highway Administration’s par­ent orga­ni­za­tion]. We went there and did it, and there was about an-hour-and-a-half Q and A after­ward. Not only did they not say it couldn’t be done, they were help­ing us, bounc­ing ideas off of us, such as retro­fitting exist­ing roads with these things—they could sim­ply be laid over exist­ing asphalt.”

After the pre­sen­ta­tion, Scott and Julie returned to Idaho and went back to their day-to-day lives, push­ing on the project part time. Close to a year later, the fed­eral Department of Transportation, run­ning very short of money to sink into road­ways that pro­vided no rec­i­p­ro­cal income, sent out a solic­i­ta­tion for ideas for road­ways that would pay for them­selves within their lifetimes.

Scott got in touch with the DOT and explained what they were doing. “We did some cal­cu­la­tions on how we could actu­ally make solar road­ways pay for them­selves over their lifes­pan, which we’re shoot­ing for at 20 years—not that hard. You lay these things down and they start gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­ity, and now two things are hap­pen­ing: you’re get­ting rid of petroleum-based asphalt, but far more sig­nif­i­cantly, the more solar road pan­els you install, the less coal you’re using to gen­er­ate electricity.”

The DOT was sold, and Solar Roadways got their first fund­ing. They were off and running!

The Road Goes On

At this point, they have built a pro­to­type, and a video of it can be seen on their web­site. Scott and Julie are now look­ing for their next round of fund­ing, which would enable them to exactly for­mu­late the glass sur­face needed for the roadways.

They are seek­ing fund­ing from numer­ous sources, but recently GE announced what they are call­ing their “Ecomagination Challenge.” The win­ner of this chal­lenge could win up to $200 mil­lion to fund his or her project. It is based on vot­ing from the public—and so Scott and Julie are ask­ing every­one to vote for Solar Roadways before the end of September. The link is below.

“The final stage is devel­op­ing that sur­face,” Scott con­cluded. “Jimmy Carter put solar pan­els on the White House in the sev­en­ties, and we’ve had heat­ing ele­ments in back win­dows of our cars for I don’t know how long. We’re sur­rounded by microprocessor-driven LEDs. So all the tech­nol­ogy we’re using is old stuff except for that glass sur­face. If we could get GE to fund our project, we could be on the high­ways in just a few short years.”

And that would be a major accom­plish­ment for sus­tain­able energy.

To find out more about Solar Roadways and their progress, visit their web­site at www.solarroadways.com.

To vote for Solar Roadways in GE’s Ecomagination Challenge, visit http://www.solarroadways.com/vote.shtml.

Click here to see a video pre­sen­ta­tion about the Solar Roadways Project.